Peru Diary, Day 1

Today I arrived in Lima. The flight itself was pretty nice. I spent most of the flight from Miami talking to a nice man named Ken who was visiting Peru for the 7th time. He had a lot of good suggestions. The conversation hit some real awkward turbulence when he asked me if I was traveling alone, which I think is a super rude question to ask a woman who seems to be traveling alone, because she’ll feel obligated to lie to you and she won’t be good at it, and will probably say something that contradicts some earlier fact about her plans. Because we all saw Taken, and though we understand it was mostly paternalistic xenophobic fear mongering, we don’t want to be that one idiot. Anyway, we got past it.

There was a real tragedy that happened to me at the ATM machine in baggage claim, where Ken pulled out money and then left behind his ATM card. I handed it to him, because I was behind him in line and am just a really great person, and then in the sort of irony that probably gave rise to the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished”, I left my card in there when I was done. I think if I hadn’t been so busy congratulating myself on being helpful, and if Ken hadn’t been distracting me by thanking me, I probably would’ve remembered my card. If I weren’t meeting my parents tomorrow I’d really be in deep shit. I’m thankful I took out the maximum amount of soles (which is, like, a hundred bucks). The card is dead now and it’s all going to be fine, I guess. I hope I am getting all my dumbshit stuff out of the way early. Woo!

I just want to highlight that while I was waiting for my computer to start and connect to the internet so I could see if all my money had been stolen and Skype with my bank, all I could think of was this.

My hotel is nice. It’s in a neighborhood called Miraflores.

Other observations: Lima looks a whole lot like Santo Domingo. The city government here has taken on a monstrous coastal improvement project the scale of which boggles the mind. It’s nice and cold.